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The Australian and Swedish governments show themselves to be poodles of the American establishment, Australia by besmerching a citizen who hasn’t yet been charged with any related crime, and Sweden by resurrecting a once-dropped legal case surrounding unprotected consensual sex.

Wikileaks acted as a distributor of information they have been supplied with, and following true journalistic principles, have protected their source. If there is a crime, it has not been carried out by wikileaks. You can argue about whether they should be more discriminating about what they have released but that is not illegal.

The released cables have been created, stored and inadequately protected by the American government. The fault lies with them for allowing them to be accessed and released. Indeed it may yet prove to be an ‘inside job’.

The australian government’s behaviour so far in this shameful episode has been grubby and cowardly – sucking up to American popular opinion. Grow some balls, Australia, and defend a citizen who has done nothing but reveal the shabby truth about what is actually going on in global politics.

Afghanistan now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is being converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in huts and houses but in factories. The chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads (improved by international aid) with NATO forces.

The principal sources of these precursor chemicals are believed to be Mexico, China, Europe, Central Asia and India. Traffickers hide the sources of their chemicals by repackaging or false labelling. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, markets and processing facilities are clustered in border areas of Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan.

Acetic anhydride (AA) is the most commonly used chemical agent in heroin processing. According to the DEA, Mexico is the major source of AA and authorities in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan routinely seize ton-quantity shipments of acetic anhydride.

A July 2008 report, carried by the Boston Globe, quotes Christina Oguz, country representative for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, saying that just 1% of these precursor chemicals are ever seized – even though these chemicals are all imported by the tanker-load, and have no ‘dual-use’ justification

It follows that there are many players with a much larger financial stake in the Afghan drug traffic than local Afghan drug lords, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. Sibel Edmonds has charged that Pakistani and Turkish intelligence, working together, utilise the resources of the international networks trafficking Afghan heroin.

Others have written about the ties between U.S. intelligence and the Turkish narco-intelligence connection. A former top-level DEA agent in the Middle East, has corroborated the CIA interest in that region’s drug connection, apparently stating that “In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA”.

The UNODC Executive Director, Antonio Maria Costa, has reported that “money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.”

This video, and many others like it can be used as a starting point to explore these allegations.

The Opium machine continues to thrive in Afghanistan. The Russians were often accused of sanctioning and assisting in the production and distribution of Opium whist in Afghanisatn. Has anything changed?

Drug production in Afghanistan has increased dramatically since the US-led invasion and a recent report by the United Nations states that Afghan opium is having a devastating impact on the world, killing thousands in consumer countries.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported that Ahmad Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, is involved in the opium trade, meets with Taliban leaders, and is also a CIA operative.

This is a piece of video that makes you glad that for the existence of the medium, and of the Internet.

Invaluable experience and knowledge that otherwise could have been lost forever. It will explain much about what is going on today, but the events recalled are more than sixty years past and the interview itself was conducted in 1982.

G. Edward Griffin interviews Norman Dodd, congressional Director of Research for the Reece Committee, 1953-1954. The Reece Committee’s purpose was to investigate the seemingly unconstitutional activities of tax-exempt foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller or Carnegie Endowment.

For those in the developed world, Asbestos may seem like a health hazard from the past: A cancer-causing fibre banned in the EU, Australia and elsewhere and limited to a small number of products in the United States. Scientists have long agreed that any exposure to Asbestos presents grave risks. Yet an investigation from the Center for Public Integrity and the BBC has found that Asbestos is still being used at shockingly high levels throughout the developing world.

Adrian Salbuchi is an Argentinian economist who has plenty to say about the banking system and the Global Financial Crisis. This video is a year or so old but it acts as a good introduction to his thoughts, and we’ll be covering more of his material in future.

Using his experience of the financial difficulties experienced in Argentina, Adrian explains the lead up to the Global Financial Crisis, describing the whole Global Financial System as one vast Ponzi Scheme, based on:

(1) Artificially controlling the supply of public State-issued Currency
(2) Artificially imposing Banking Money as the primary source of funding in the economy
(3) Promoting “doing everything by Debt” and
(4) Erecting complex channels that allow privatisation of profits when the model is in expansion mode and socialisation of losses when the model goes into contraction mode.

There’s a lot of talk about BP being a purely British company. Actually, the ownership structure and control of the company is a lot more complex.

Some facts that have not been reported in the news:

1. 29% of BP is owned by JP Morgan and US companies own 39% of it total

2. Halliburton, one of the main contractors on the rig, is considered the party responsible for failing to cap the well properly. They moved their headquarters out of the US to Dubai recently.

3. The former CEO from 1997 to 2009 who was ousted by a sex scandal was also Chairman of Goldman Sachs. Goldman sold a massive amount of its BP holdings in early 2010 and one of its employees bragged in an e-mail in early April that they were “shorting” the Gulf and looking forward to huge profits from an environmental disaster there.